2012 R2

**UPDATE** Oddly this portion of the update is no longer published in the TechNet Article. Hoping that it’s added back soon.

—

To coincide with the Microsoft Build conference and the announcement of Windows 8.1 Update, Microsoft will be releasing an update for Windows Server 2012 R2 per the published TechNet article on 2 April 2014 found here:

The most interesting of the three major updates as noted in the TechNet article is by far this:

Active Directory Federation Services (AD FS) has added the capability for an administrator to enable signing in with an alternate login ID that is an attribute of the user object in Active Directory Domain Services (AD DS). This enables customers to adopt Azure Active Directory without modifying on-premises User Principal Names (UPNs). It also allows users to log in to the computer using an Office 365 email address instead of a UPN. This change does not affect the Active Directory schema. For more information, see Configuring Alternate Login ID.

If you start to think about the opportunities this provides for an additional way to store user identity without necessarily having to go through and completely change the naming schema that you’re using for your AD at the moment. Or at least that’s the way that I see it.

Looking forward to these bits being available on 8 April 2014 on the Download Center to begin testing this things out.

Official blog announcement from the Windows Server Product Team available here: